10 Brain Teasers for High School Students

If you are in high school, chances are that your life is a blur of classes, homework, extracurriculars, and other obligations. It can be all too easy to feel like you are running on empty or to feel like your brain can’t take another essay or another lecture. Fortunately, there are ways to help your brain stay fresh even through the longest lectures and the most intense homework assignments. One of the best ways to keep your mind sharp is with brain teasers. Testing your wits against clever questions can help you to develop a nimble mental approach to problem-solving that can aid you in a variety of situations, including with tests and exams and in the writing of essays.

Let’s explore ten fun brain teasers that can help you become sharper and nimbler in all your academic and professional endeavors. We’ll ask the questions first and then share the answers at the end, after you’ve had an opportunity to try your hand at solving these clever conundrums.

Questions

1. In this scenario, you are a police detective investigating a crime scene. There is a large wooden box that has a single door, which is locked from the inside. You break into the box and find a dead man hanging from a rope strung from the ceiling, his feet three feet off the ground. There is nothing else in the room except for a puddle of water underneath the dead man. Your supervisor asks you for a report. What do you tell her happened here?
2. You run a bakery but the dishwasher has broken down. You desperately need to get a batch of cookies into the oven or a special event, but the dishwasher repair person won’t be able to arrive until this afternoon. You need four cups of flour for the recipe, but your only clean measuring cups hold five cups and three cups. Using only these measuring cups, how can you measure exactly four cups of flour?
3. As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives: How many were going to St. Ives?
4. What are the next three letters in the series WATNTL?
5. What has a mouth but cannot eat, moves without legs, and a bank with no money?
6. What makes the number 8,549,176,320 unique?
7. A mother and a father have six sons. Each son has one sister. How many people are in the family?
8. What five-letter word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?
9. A man left home running. He turned left, ran more, turned left, ran more, turned left and returned home. Two masked men were waiting for him. Who are they?
10. You are running a race and as you approach the finish line you pass the person in second place. What place did you finish?

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Now let’s check out the answers to our brain teasers!

Answers

1. The dead man used a block of ice to hang himself, and the ice melted after he died. 
2. Fill the three-cup measuring cup and dump it into the five-cup measuring cup. Fill it again and dump as much into the five-cup measuring cup as it will hold. This leaves one cup in the three-cup measuring cup. Dump out the five-cup measuring cup. Add the contents of the three-cup measuring cup to the five-cup measuring cup. Then fill the three-cup measuring cup again and add it to the five-cup measuring cup. This gives you four cups.
3. One. Everyone else was going the other way.
4. INS. The series is the first letter of each word in the sentence.
5. A river.
6. The number contains all ten numerals in alphabetical order.
7. Nine: The mother, the father, six sons, and one daughter. The brothers all share one sister.
8. Short. You add “er” to make it “shorter.”
9. The catcher and the umpire. It’s a baseball game.
10. You finished in second place. The person in first place is still ahead of you.

Why It Is Important to Tease Your Brain

Every day we face the necessity to solve lots of problems. It may sound a bit strange, but even the smallest decision like “which bread to buy” is seen by our brain as a problem that requires energy and sometimes willpower. Brain teasers are like small exercises that keep our brains toned up. They also help to deal with the tons of information we face daily — when the brain is toned up, it doesn’t get exhausted that easily. However, are all the brain teasers equally useful? Unfortunately no. The ones we listed above are classic brain teasers with which you can entertain yourself at any time you want. There are lots of online brain teasers that offer you to engage in some “developing clicking” activities — find differences, avoid collision of objects, etc. Unfortunately, such actions make you better only in dealing with such activities. The fact that you perform better in such games doesn’t mean that your brain became more toned up. It only means that you have developed a skill. Meanwhile, writing essays or just a personal diary is good for your cognitive skills. If you want to engage all the major parts of your brain, then spare at least 15 minutes a day for handwriting. It works both as a brain teaser and a meditation.